This watchdog blog, by journalist Norman Oder, offers analysis, commentary, and reportage about the $4.9 billion project to build the Barclays Center arena and 16 high-rise buildings at a crucial site in Brooklyn. Dubbed Atlantic Yards by developer Forest City Ratner in 2003, it was rebranded Pacific Park in 2014 after the Chinese government-owned Greenland Group bought a 70% stake in 15 towers. New York State still calls it Atlantic Yards. Contact: AtlanticYardsReport[at]hotmail.com

Lev Leviev, the Israeli billionaire, made many New Yorkers sit up and take notice when he bought the former New York Times Building on West 43rd Street in 2007 for $525 million, three times what the seller paid for it 30 months earlier.

It was a bold declaration that Mr. Leviev, who planned to spend an additional $170 million transforming the landmark building into a first-class office building, wanted to be a real estate player in New York. It was also a deal emblematic of an era when buyers and bankers imagined that rents and values would soar forever.

Now Leviev wants to turn the building into a mix of luxury shops, a bowling alley, a high-end hotel, and 26 penthouse condominiums on top. And some of the lenders who lent Leviev $711 million have had to take a bath.

It's a prime example of real estate froth and well worthy of coverage.

But the Times, as I wrote four years ago still hasn't reported, as the Village Voice explained in an 11/20/04 article headlined The Times' Sweetheart Deal, that the Times Company had underestimated the profit on the sale of its long-term headquarters by some 50 percent, which might have eliminated the need to subsidize the new Times Tower built on 8th Avenue in partnership with Forest City Ratner.